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There are said to be Three Wonders of the
Bodhisattva

Joseph
Campbell--the great light and "wise old man" of Toby Johnson's
spiritual journey--wrote glowingly about the myth of the Bodhisattva
and the The Way of Joyful Participation inthe Sorrows of the World.Campbell
wrote: "This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the
androgynous character of the presence . . . the initiate learns that
male and female are (as paraphrased in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad)
'two halves of a split pea'. . ."

"The
second wonder to be noted in the Bodhisattva myth is its annihilation
of the distinction between life and release-from-life--which is
symbolized . . . in the Bodhisattva's renunciation of Nirvana . . .""The
third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely,
the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of
eternity and time)."

Note
to
readers: if you came upon this webpage through a search on Buddhism or
the name Avalokiteshvara, you may be surprised to discover an article
on an aspect of gay men's spiritual consciousness. You might even be
scandalized to read about a gay man's mystical experience.

Let
me
invite you to relax your expectations and read on. You may discover
something about yourself--and certainly about your gay friends and
compatriots in the world of samsara--that will surprise and edify you.There
are several articles on this website about the story of
Avalokiteshvara, most of them not quite as "outrageous" as this one.
There are links below to several of them including: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara and The
myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara

Especially
if the very idea of "gay men's spirituality" seems odd or shocking to
you,
please read on and/or look at Toby Johnson's main
page

One night in
the late 1970s,
(July 14, 1978 to be exact),
I
checked
into the 21st Street Baths a few blocks from my San Francisco Noe
Valley apartment. Within five minutes I felt I'd made a mistake.
Nobody looked attractive to me and nobody seemed to find me
attractive. There was only one young man I was interested in and he
didn't pay any notice of me.

I watched TV awhile, delaying in case somebody
else
might
show
up. I wondered why I'd come. Earlier I'd been feeling lonely. I
really need to be touched, I'd said to myself. I could still feel the
neediness all through my chest and shoulders. I wasn't ready to leave
yet.

I went into one of the common rooms upstairs.
It
was a
large
dark space with cushioned platforms around the walls. As I made my
way into the darkness, a hand reached out and touched me on the
thigh. I looked, but could not see who was there. I automatically
resisted. What if I were being groped by some unattractive troll?

Well, no wonder you're lonely, I said to
myself. If
anybody
chooses you, you reflexively assume you wouldn't want them. You're
caught in the webs of karma: getting rejected because you reject
others.

As my eyes
adjusted, I saw
it was
the
young man I'd noticed earlier. I moved closer. We started in on the
kind of impersonal play that goes on in the orgy room at a bathhouse,
but then soon changed tempo. We lay down on the platform, side by
side, facing each other, holding one another tenderly. Innocently
violating the stolid silence, the young man introduced himself to me
as Jim. He said, "You seem sad," and asked how I was doing.

Surprised by the opportunity for
communication,
wanting
more
from this meeting than just an ejaculation--and sensing the openness
on Jim's part, I told him about my earlier loneliness and about my
disappointment with the baths as any sort of remedy. Jim listened
carefully. Occasionally he murmured or squeezed me warmly to let me
know he was paying attention.

Surprising myself with the depth of honesty I
displayed,
I
started talking about my spiritual life. I told him about my past as
a Catholic seminarian and my conversion, by way of Carl Jung and
Joseph Campbell to a kind of New Age Buddhism. I recounted several
major spiritual experiences in my life, acknowleding that I found the
clash between my spirituality and my liberated gay sexuality somewhat
confusing.

We lay together in an embrace that was not
entirely
sexual, but
was not unsexual either. We occasionally shifted in one another's
arms sliding slowly against each other to renew the touch. I felt his
flesh, warm and slightly electric, against my chest. I felt our cocks
lying full but not hard between us against our bellies.

He said he was a switchboard operator at
Langley
Porter,
the
psych hospital at U.C. San Francisco, but didn't say much else about
himself--other than that he too struggled with joining his
spirituality and his sexuality. He commended me on being spiritually
inclined and coaxed me to talk some more.

I told him of my effort to live a good life,
to be
compassionate and sensitive to other people, to participate in my
culture and in my society, to pursue a right livelihood as a gay
counselor, to be politically and ecologically aware, to live
responsibly, and not to cause harm or pain--to discover how to be a
saint as a modern gay man. I told him about the sorrow that seemed to
come to me, inspite of my good efforts, instead of joy.

Almost lecturing him, assuming he wouldn't
know
about
such
things, I explained how Buddhism teaches that all existence is
sorrowful. I lamented the pang of sorrow I found in being gay--not
from guilt, but from the frustration of seeing such sexual beauty all
around me and feeling--on the ego level--inadequate to participate,
but beyond that--on some metaphysical level--simply unable to possess
it all.

"So many men, so little time," he rejoined
jokingly
with
one of
the war cries of the Sexual Revolution.

"Yes, but on a much deeper level," I replied.
"It's
like
I want
to be everybody and know their lives from inside, feel their flesh as
my own."

I told Jim
about my
obsession with
a
particular Mahayana Buddhist myth. "The Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
was this enlightened being who chose to renounce nirvana and remain
within the cycles of reincarnation," I explained. "Out of generosity,
he vowed to take upon himself the suffering of the world in order to
bring all beings to nirvana with him. He's a world savior, a little
like Jesus." I cited the John and Mimi Fariņa folk song "Pack
Up Your Sorrows" as an example of this myth: "If somehow you could
pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them; I
know how to use them, give them all to me."

"When I first came across this story, maybe
without
realizing
what I was doing," I confided, "in a burst of fervor I committed
myself to this myth. I mean I made the bodhisattva's vow. Does that
mean I'm doomed to suffer? And is the suffering a gay man gets these
days the loneliness and isolation that comes with living in a
sexually active environment, maybe getting sex but never quite
finding the love, just the frustration and disappointment?" (This was
in the 1970s, before AIDS, and the metaphysical suffering of the gay
community had not yet become physically manifest in sorrowful deaths
all around us as it would a few years later.)

"Is this a holy way to live?" I asked
plaintively.

"That's a pretty dismal interpretation of the
story," Jim
answered. "Isn't a better interpretation of that myth that since the
bodhisattva took on everyone's incarnation, he is the One Being that
is reincarnating. You can rejoice that he accepted your karma. You
are him. You are everybody. The Being in you is the Being in
everybody else. Embracing the suffering of the world doesn't mean
being unhappy. It means deciding that everything is great just the
way it is, that life is worth choosing--in spite of sorrow.

"The Bodhisattva took on the suffering of the
world
in
order to
transform it and save sentient beings from suffering, not to glorify
suffering and get people to feel guilty about being happy and punish
themselves. That sounds more like a Christian misinterpretation of
the story than the bodhisattva wisdom."

I was surprised by his answer. "You know about
the
bodhisattva?" I asked quzzically.

"Yes, I know," Jim said, smiling enigmatically
in
the
faint red
light of the orgy room.

All of a
sudden, to my
dismay, I
understood this man to be saying not simply that, like all beings, he
was a manifestation of the Central Self that in Mahayana Buddhism is
mythologized in the story of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, but that
he was, in a unique way, a specific incarnation of that divine being.

I felt my world whirling out of control. I was
in
the
presence
of one of my most beloved of gods--right there in the flesh:
Avalokitesvara holding me close, in the orgy room at the 21st Street
Baths. A thrill of excitement, mystical wonder, bewilderment, and
consolation coursed through me.

I experienced intentionally linking my soul
with
that of
this
other man, chakra by chakra. I felt an enormous rush of energy
pouring through me--body and soul. In a certain way you could say I
was falling in love and feeling love's joy.

My head was spinning. I seemed to have entered
into
some
truly
"underworld" state in which the gods took on real flesh. I wondered
if I'd gotten delusional. I wondered if we were both just playing a
game with one another, spinning out the implications of a mythology
we both happened to know about.. Maybe he was just another stoned
hippie like me carrying on with all this new age stuff.

What did it matter? I asked myself. Whatever
was
happening, it
certainly was marvelous. Far more than just having found somebody to
have sex with. This wasn't even exactly "sex," but it was fully
satisfying of the loneliness I'd felt earlier. Whoever he was, he was
manifesting the bodhisattva truth. What did it matter?

Almost as if addressing my bewilderment, Jim
said,
"Have
faith."

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"Faith that things are never totally true or
totally
false,
faith that life won't destroy us, that nothing really matters because
it's all okay." He laughed. "Live in the present. Don't try to
possess the world, have faith in the world."

Then abruptly he announced, "It's time for me
to be
going
now."

"Can I see you again?" I asked, already
feeling
bereft.

"Don't cling," he replied, in a way that
sounded
more
like
wisdom teaching than rejection.

A pang of loss struck me, but I understood the
spiritual
lesson
to live in the present and not to be attached, to enjoy the joy I was
feeling without trying to possess it.

The incident
changed me. It
affirmed my
belief in a healthy spiritual life lived in the styles of modern gay
culture. It caused me afterwards to take time in gay settings to
bless the other men and women, wishing grace for them, perceiving
them as manifestations of the One Being, intending for them that they
also discover their god manifesting to them in the form of another
gay person to show them love and bring them joy.

Toby Johnson, PhDis
author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of
his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor
of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.

Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.

His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.

FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned from Joseph Campbell: The Myth
of the Great Secret III tells the story of Johnson's learning the
real nature of religion and myth and discovering the spiritual
qualities of gay male consciousness.